A PLMN is a network established and operated by a government or an operator approved by the government, and is intended to provide land mobile communications services to the general public. This network needs to interconnect with a PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network, public switched telephone network) to form a communications network that covers the whole region or country. In the mainland region of China, common PLMNs include those of China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom.
In the construction process of a cell, a MOCN (Multi-Operator Core Network, multi-operator core network) technology is introduced to maximize sharing of radio resources and reduce operator's costs. A core idea of the MOCN technology is to let the cell be shared by multiple operators, that is, the cell is shared by multiple PLMNs. With the cell being shared by multiple operators, the cell is connected to core network devices of different PLMNs, where the core network devices may be an MSC (Mobile Switching Center, mobile switching center) or an SGSN (Serving GPRS SUPPORT NODE, serving GPRS support node), and the like. On the basis of the MOCN technology, a FULL MOCN technology is developed.
In a FULL MOCN, for a mobile terminal in a connected state, for example, when the mobile terminal is in a Dedicated (dedicated) mode, a Packet Transfer (packet transfer) mode, or a Dual Transfer (dual transfer) mode, if the mobile terminal is handed over from a first cell to a neighboring second cell and the second cell is shared by multiple PLMNs, generally a core network device randomly specifies a PLMN for the mobile terminal for handover, which, however, may cause the mobile terminal to be handed over to an inappropriate PLMN. For example, when the mobile terminal is handed over from the first cell to the neighboring second cell, if the second cell is shared by a PLMN1 and a PLMN2 and a tariff of the mobile terminal of the PLMN1 is lower than a tariff of the PLMN2, the core network device may hand over the mobile terminal to the PLMN2 according to the method in the prior art.